- Author: Stephen Dampier
Naming Conventions
![Using careful Naming Conventions for Internet URLS, directories, files and images, humans and search engines will find your work easier to read and be beneficial for SEO and Accessibility. Using careful Naming Conventions for Internet URLS, directories, files and images, humans and search engines will find your work easier to read and be beneficial for SEO and Accessibility.](http://ucanr.edu/blogs/wat/blogfiles/97821.png)
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ipants".
- Author: Ben Faber
Here is a really good introduction to the use of the on-line Soil Survey from USDA. Maybe it is easier to follow than blogs I have posted in the past.
WASHINGTON — “Soil don't get no respect,” Rodney Dangerfield might have said (but didn't). Perhaps you know your state bird or flower, but do you know your state soil?
Well, in recent years soil has begun to get more respect. Since the celebration of the Soil Survey Centennial back in 1999, each state has been given its own official state soil. It was in 1899 that the U. S. Department of Agriculture started its survey of all the soils in the country.
SOILS COME IN MANY ‘Flavours'
You might wonder what a “soil survey” really is. Isn't it all just dirt — some perhaps stickier, or redder or deeper — that lies beneath forest, meadow, farm, home and garden?
There you go again. Not enough respect.
In fact, soils are distinctive, as different from each other as robins are from blue jays. These differences are hard to appreciate, of course, because soil is mostly underground, hidden from view. But if you were to dig some holes a few feet deep and then look carefully at their inside surfaces, you would find that soils are made up of layers of varying thickness, called horizons. One soil might differ from the next not only in the thickness of its horizons, but also in their appearance and feel.
Horizons might be as white as chalk, as red as rust, or as dark brown as chocolate. A horizon might be cement-hard, gritty with sand, or stuff for sculpture. And if you were to tease the dirt along one edge of the hole so it falls away naturally — wow! — each horizon would reveal its particles clumped together in arrangements like plates, blocks or prisms. Such information, and more, has allowed soils to be classified, much as birds, flowers and other living things are.
CLASSIFYING SOILS
Modern soil classification goes back only a few decades, when all the world's soils were grouped taxonomically into a dozen “orders.” Differences among orders reflect the formative influence of a particular combination of climate, plants and animals, topography, time and original rock material.
Just as all vertebrate animals are huddled together by biologists into smaller groupings (mammals, say) and those groupings into still smaller ones, so each soil order is divided and subdivided to include more distinctly different soils. At the end of the dividing and subdividing, you end up with a “soil series” identified with a proper name — like the Haven series in my vegetable garden, for example.
YOUR STATE'S AND BACKYARD'S SOIL
A particular soil becomes an official state soil by being widespread within the state; being distinctive chemically or physically; having some degree of name recognition; and, of course, getting a legislative stamp of approval. Examples include soils like West Virginia's Monongahela soil, Texas' Houston Black soil, California's San Joaquin soil and New York's Honeoye soil.
The job, now, of these “ambassadors” of the benevolent underworld is to rekindle awareness of soil's value as a natural resource that can only be renewed very slowly. Soil provides food, shelter, clothing and more, yet it is being lost at alarming rates to everything from blacktop to erosion.
Out in the garden this spring, dig a hole deep and wide enough that you can see and appreciate at least some of the various and distinctive horizons.
Then, if you want the name and a detailed description of that soil — or any soil — look at the maps and descriptions in the Soil Survey Reports issued by the U. S. Department of Agriculture, Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS). Search online for “soil survey nrcs” and you'll find links to soil maps for counties throughout the U.S. Or go to the link to “web soil survey.” At this site, you can type in a street address around which you “draw” your area of interest (AOI). The site will delineate the names and descriptions of soils within that AOI.
And of course this is available as an app at:
https://casoilresource.lawr.ucdavis.edu/soilweb-apps/
Online:
www.leereich.com/blog
leereich.com
http://www.leereich.com/2016/06/edens-gardens.html
![soil weathered from rock soil weathered from rock](/blogs/blogcore/blogfiles/49578.png)
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
You may not like spiders. You may have Arachnophobia, a fear of spiders, or maybe you just dislike all spiders.
But still, some spiders are spectacular. Stunning. Striking.
Take the redfemured spotted orbweaver, Neoscona domiciliorum. It's "endemic to the United States, southeast of a line joning Texas, Indiana and Massachusetts," according to Wikipedia. The species, domiciliorum, refers to the fact is it often found living on buildings.
Well, not this time.
We found it in our pollinator garden in Vacaville, Calif.
There it was, dangling from its web, looking oh-so-pretty in the early morning light. Its color blended in with the Mexican sunflowers, Tithonia.
Later that afternoon, an alfalfa butterfly, considered a notorious pest, dangled there. And the redfemured spotted orbweaver was nowhere in sight.
It never returned to devour its prey.
![A redfemured spotted orbweaver, Neoscona domiciliorum, dangles from its web. In the background are Mexican sunflowers, Tithonia. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey) A redfemured spotted orbweaver, Neoscona domiciliorum, dangles from its web. In the background are Mexican sunflowers, Tithonia. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)](/blogs/blogcore/blogfiles/38489.jpg)
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Pity the poor honey bees.
They have to contend with pesticides, parasites, pests, diseases, malnutrition, stress and that mysterious malady called colony collapse disorder in which adult bees abandon the hive, leaving behind the queen, immature bees and food stores.
The primary pest of bees? The blood-sucking, virus-transmitting varroa mite, found in probably every hive in the country.
But there are other pests that target the honey bee as well--from praying mantids and dragonflies to birds and spiders.
It's a predator gauntlet out there to make the round trip from their hive to their foraging site and back.
We recently saw a honey bee trapped in a spider web stretched from a honeysuckle bush to a purple salvia. The bee's fatal mistake was taking a shortcut to the lavender patch.
The bee, incongruously bubble-wrapped by the spider for a future meal, twisted in the breeze.
It was not alone. A horde of freeloader flies, family Milichiidae, and probably genus Desmometopa, made sure of that.
It was a bad day for a honey bee but a good day for the spider and the flies.
Just another day for the predators and the prey. And a few square meals in the circle of life.
![Freeloader flies, from family Milichiidae, crowd the carcass of a honey bee trapped in a web. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey) Freeloader flies, from family Milichiidae, crowd the carcass of a honey bee trapped in a web. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)](/blogs/blogcore/blogfiles/32888.jpg)
- Author: Ben Faber
Historically if you wanted to know what soil type and the description for it, it was necessary to go to the library, NRCS office or Coop Extension office to find the soil survey. It is a book out of print now, but it has maps with outlines of the soils of that county and the descriptions that characterize those soils. The USDA put the Soil Survey online about 10 years ago
http://websoilsurvey.sc.egov.usda.gov/App/HomePage.htm
and it is great unless the internet goes down.
Toby O'Geen at UC Davis has taken the same information and repackaged it so that it is easier to use
http://casoilresource.lawr.ucdavis.edu/gmap/
Try it.
![soil soil](/blogs/blogcore/blogfiles/19376.jpg)